Travel Hack Without Credit Cards!

Travel hacking is often talking about getting free or cheap flights by churning through credit cards and getting points. But what if you want to travel but don't feel comfortable with that?

​I got you covered!

There are a couple different ways, and I'm sure many more, to help you find cheap flights.

Let The Deals Find You
These are sites that you enter in your airport of choice and they will email you periodically with cheap flights. When you get an email you have to feel comfortable moving fast as they can change pretty quickly. These sites are great because they are constantly sending you emails that make you want to travel. 'Do you want to go to Iceland for $200?' as a matter of fact I did! These sites are best if you are flexible with your time and booking in advance or going during slow season. 

Next Vacay - A membership will cost you $25 for a year and comes with a 1 month free trial.  I was still in the trial period before I found my trip to Australia. I had been looking to go over my winter break of 2017 and was seeing that flights were around $2000- $2200. Within a week or two I got an email saying there were cheap flights from LA to Sydney for like $550 in the spring of 2018. I emailed my bosses to seeing if I could take the week off before my spring break and by the time I woke up the price had increased to around $800 so I just booked it. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission! I don't live in LA but was able to get there and back using Southwest miles.

Scott's Cheap Flights - I have never used Scott's but it looks like it would work very similar to Next Vacay. It is $50 for a year and you can cancel anytime.

Escape Flights - The site originally started only finding cheap flights out of Houston but has since added New York/ Newark Los Angeles, Chicago/Milwaukee, Seattle, and Portland. You can either sign up for a free subscription or go to the site and browse around to see what catches your eye. Obviously if you don't live in these cities you need to add in the costs and time of travel to these places. Last month I tried to convince my mom to snag a round trip flight from LA to Paris in February for $295 with 1 stop.

Whitsunday Islands, Australia

Find Flights On Your Own
Maybe you have a specific place and time in mind and want to find a cheap flight there. This will be a little trickier but I have some recommendations.

If you are going to look for flights using Google Chrome make sure you use an incognito window. 

Have you ever been looking at flights and come back later and they are more expensive? Companies now spy on your searches and know if people are looking for those flights and increase them. Using an incognito window should help and is easy to do. Just click on file and it should be right there.

Google Search - This one comes down to personal preference because whether you use Google, SkyScanner, Expedia, etc. they all use the same thing information and come back with the same results. I actually checked the same flight and dates across them just to make sure before I said that. I typically use Google.

Airefarewatchdog - The site combines a little big of everything. They have flights, a travel blog, alerts and more!

Hopper - ​ You'll need to download the app to your phone but their goal is to help you track flights and know when the right time to book is based off their data. 

If you have any other ways that you are able to travel on the cheap I'd love to hear them!